Good weather, bad wildfires. Yesterday smelled like charred leaves and there’s ash everywhere, like a damn volcano went off. It’s the end of February and we’re all looking around wondering when winter is gonna start.

Inspired by friend Lindsay’s new posting style, I’m shooting for a weekly update schedule to account for what I’ve been doing lately.

What I’ve been reading:

A Bug in the System, from last year’s New Yorker. Food safety is so gross and fascinating, and this actually grabbed the part of me that’s interested in legal nuances, which is touuuugh to do. Bill Marler is one of those rare stories of someone who’s seized a legal specialty and has wound up doing sincere and needed heavy lifting in regulation reform.

The Last Days of Target Canada, amazing for its epic slow collapse as well as the multitude of things that went wrong, one right after another. How did they not know? It boggles the mind.

Again, on Lindsay’s advice in another post, I picked up the ebook Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Better, Faster Writing by Rachel Aaron. I am slowly preparing myself to tackle edits and (most definitely) rewrites on the Nanowrimo 2015 project, and I have realized that I need a tight set of strictures going into this. Good advice, and my thoughts on outlining (namely that it leads to books feeling like original 1960s episodes of Scooby-Doo) started to feel ready for a change.

WAIT WHAT YOU MEAN YOU AREN’T JUST GONNA PUT PEOPLE IN INTERESTING CONTRIVED SITUATIONS WITH PRETTY CLOTHES AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS???

This led me to find a copy of John Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story (it’s turtles all the way down when it comes to me and books, and do you see what I did there with the WorldCat record? LIBRARIANING!), which is like the Aaron book, but far more in-depth and with a greater variety of examples and things to consider.Continue reading Weekly rundown 1/23→

The Wind in the Willows is one of those classics that I’d never gotten around to reading until recently, even though it has all these attributes of the kinds of books I studied for my undergraduate major. I didn’t even really know that much about it, except for the fact that Disney made a cartoon of it, and that there’s an associated ride at Disneyland where you can go to and then escape from Hell in a cute motorcar buggy.

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It makes me happy that they’re choosing to annotate any of the episodes in the first place, but this is a particularly good one, if only for all the Hank Williams, Jr. history that the annotators had to go back and research. Imagine having that job.

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books:
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them for yourself.